Tag Archives: album

It’s a difficult statistic to come to terms with. Madness has been a functioning unit in one form or another – with only the occasional time out along the way – since 1976. That’s longer than most marriages. Next year their début album One Step Beyond… will be forty years old. So what better way to celebrate the band’s 39th anniversary than with another compilation album?

Obviously there are lots of better ways, given that there are already more far more Madness compilation albums than regular studio albums. In fact, both singer Suggs and airborne saxophonist Lee “Kix” Thompson have separately wandered down similar routes: Suggs’ series of live spoken word shows has been adapted by Julien Temple into a film My Life Story: The Movie, while Thompson has teamed up with director Jeff Baynes to create the feature length “rocku-docu-mockumentary” One Man’s Madness. Both films are due for DVD release soon (the Suggs feature was scheduled for a March release but still doesn’t seem to have materialised), the latter accompanied by a soundtrack CD. You know what that means, of course – another Madness compilation!

There is rather more to the One Man’s Madness double CD than just another rehash of the Nutty Boys’ hits though. Of course the main points of the band’s ’80s heyday are covered – Night Boat to Cairo, Baggy Trousers, House of Fun in its now little heard single version with the crashing ending that sounds like a funfair falling over a cliff – but the hits mingle with less familiar Madness cuts (Deceives the Eye, Rockin’ in A&flat;, Overdone) and a fair smattering of post-1999 reunion tracks (NW5, Johnny the Horse, Dust Devil). Kix’s other extra-curricular activities are also represented with tracks by the Lee Thompson Ska Orchestra and even Crunch!, Thompson’s early ’90s post-The Madness project with Chris Foreman.

As ever with Madness compilations, there’s no denying the quality of the content, but it’s hard to see this particular set being a big seller in its own right. As with 1993’s ultimately frustrating A- and B-sides collection The Business, the music is continually interrupted by interview snippets which presumably make sense in the context of the film, whereas here they do little but disrupt the flow of the music. Last year’s Full House is a more suitable introduction for the Madness novice; completists may pick this up for the Crunch! tracks but a proper reissue of their long out of print album The Nutty Boys would be more welcome. The album does whet the appetite for the film, though, which promises to be a far more essential purchase.

These days the announcement of a new Madness compilation rarely raises an eyebrow – there have been well over a dozen of them, more than the band’s total number of studio albums, few of which cast their net wider than … read more

Morrissey returns to the fray on 17 November with a brand new album Low in High-School, preceded by live performances in the US including a date at the Hollywood Bowl one week earlier. The new album will be Morrissey’s first … read more

“An earwig crawled into my ear / Made a meal of the wax and hairs.” Sorry, what? This isn’t James, the Manchester indie darlings who became huge with Sit Down and filled stadiums with anthems like Sound, Laid and She’s … read more

“This is Manchester,” Granada Television and Factory Records’ Anthony H. Wilson once observed, “we do things differently here.” He wasn’t wrong. A collection of all the important music to have come from Manchester since the birth of punk would fill … read more

Despite a career stretching back more than three decades, to many Howard Jones is still “that spiky haired bloke with the mime”. Of course there’s much more to him than that; in fact, if you’ve been following the reruns of … read more

When a group starts re-recording its old hits, it’s hard not to see it as an admission of defeat; either the artist has no confidence in their ability to write new material, or their appeal has become so selective that … read more

Back in 1981 the NME – when it was still a music publication of some importance – put together the compilation cassette C81, a diverse set of tracks running the gamut from punk and post-punk (Pere Ubu, Virgin Prunes) to … read more

Pet Shop Boys have announced details of their long awaited reissue programme Catalogue: 1985-2012, which will see all their studio albums for Parlophone remastered and expanded with bonus material. The duo’s first six albums, from Please to Bilingual were previously … read more

We all know the story of Haircut 100, don’t we? A frothy, insubstantial pop group who scored a quartet of top ten hits and an almost number one album Pelican West in 1982; a stepping stone on lead singer Nick … read more

Here in the second decade of the 21st century, it’s getting harder and harder to find once-successful artists whose work has never been released on CD. Here’s one though: apart from a self-released live CD in 2004 and a budget … read more

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark have announced details of their new album The Punishment of Luxury and a European tour towards the end of the year. Released on 1 September, The Punishment of Luxury will be OMD’s third album since … read more

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Need something to help you through the Christmas wrapping? Join Steve and Julian for a trip back to 1982 in this week’s Off The Chart! As always there’s a host of forgotten and half-remembered hits, three tracks from one of … read more

We’re going back thirty years to this day in 1988 on this week’s Off The Chart for another two hours of hits, headlines and house music – as well as rock, pop, reggae, soul and even some old time music … read more

It’s the end of another dexy so that means our lovely Patreon backers are treated to another exclusive edition of Further Off The Chart, in which Steve and Julian from Off The Chart play some of the tracks that were … read more